More Verizon iPhone Questions
With this week’s confirmed launch of the highly anticipated “Verizon iPhone,” the big question (will it actually arrive?) has already been answered. Engadget has a thorough rundown on the history of this question and the inevitable conclusion, including yet more speculation about the road ahead with AT&T’s iPhone exclusivity coming to an end. I’ve got a few more questions to add to the mix.
Best of all, most of these questions will be answered in the next few weeks!
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Sit Back, Relax, and Enjoy the Ride
Apple’s level of success and customer adoration has created a fair amount of discomfort. As a technology steamliner, Apple is setting a record pace on the journey from one island of technologies (fixed, wired, physical media, isolated, expandable, hackable, moving parts, keyboard & mouse, open market) to another (mobile, wireless, media-less, connected, sealed appliance, “just works,” touchscreen, curated market). Investors of the old island are in a state of denial, shock, or panic. Some consumers are afraid of being taken advantage of, or worse, being left behind. Change can be frightening.
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WP7 Strategy Confusion
I’m struggling to understand Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 strategy.
The WP7 ads make it clear that the current batch of smartphones are either ridiculously inefficient or annoyingly narcissistic and addictive. So, these new WP7 phones are for people who don’t want to spend much time on their phones.
But why would a potential customer pay for a two hundred dollar phone — plus a pricy service contract — if they’re not going to use it very often? With a similar price structure to more capable and established iOS and Android devices, is UI convenience and distinctiveness going to make up the difference? Doubtful.
Third-party developers are being encouraged to port their iOS and Android apps to the WP7 platform. This makes perfect sense, since smartphones are app platforms and an app platform’s success is based on the value of its third party app catalog.
But why would a developer port or create an app for WP7 if the phone’s target market is the set of customers who don’t want to spend much time on their phones and are likely to be smarting from the phone’s initial price. How are developers expecting to make money from the low-app-usage crowd?
Clearly, these factors combined are not going to propel WP7 to iOS or Android levels of success. Likely, Microsoft understands this and is willing to stay in the smartphone software market for the long haul. If Microsoft pursues smartphones the way they pushed into gaming consoles, WP7 developers shouldn’t be disappointed by early sales figures and should stick it out for a year or two.
My point here isn’t that Microsoft is behind Apple and Google with mobile software, or even that Microsoft doesn’t know how to market their products. That’s all been said quite a bit more eloquently for the past few months all over the web.
My point is that it’s the synthesis of these fundamentally incompatible tactics:
- market to current feature phone customers
- price like iOS and Android smartphones
- alienate third party developers
which assures that WP7 won’t reach short term success.
MobileMe Calendar Upgrade
I didn’t realize that you actually have to log in to me.com to upgrade the MobileMe calendar, so I’ve been loping along with the old calendar for too long. The upgrade process had a few hair-raising moments, like the “add these 782 calendar items?” sync alert and the “you’ve got a lot of calendar events, so you’ll get the old ones back when we’ve finished your upgrade, later” message. All seems well after the upgrade, but Apple’s cloud services still make me nervous.
I can’t speak for any noticeable sync speed improvements, but the new MobileMe calendar infrastructure can sync other CalDAV and HTTP iCal subscriptions, which greatly simplifies my calendar setup across the Macs and iOS devices.
There are a few gotchas to be aware of before doing to MobileMe calendar upgrade and, while these issues won’t become roadblocks for everybody, this upgrade is not click-and-forget. The major MobileMe calendar upgrade issue are:
- [OSX] Lack of full support for OSX 10.5 and earlier
- [OSX] Lack of support from 3rd-party applications
- [OSX] Previously published (not machine-specific) calendars must be merged into MobileMe calendars
- [iOS] iOS 4+ required (or local MobileMe calendar must be changed to a CalDAV calendar), which rules out non-development iPads
Since I hardly ever log in to me.com, I hadn’t noticed the iOS-like interface change before today. iOS is definitely Apple’s new “thing,” in case there was any doubt.
Wither Apple’s Family Room Computer?
Steve Jobs stated in yesterday’s keynote address that people “don’t want a computer on their TV.” Pairing this statement with the Apple TV’s admittedly disappointing sales could lead one to believe that the iTV concept is behind Apple at this point. Or, it could be another of Steve’s famous product misdirections, fed directly to the press.
Given Apple’s strong mobile device sales, continued drive to integrate their customers’ data and devices under iTunes, and foray into social networking via Ping and Game Center, it’s hard to imagine that there isn’t an Apple concept team or two trying to probe the limits of the new Apple TV (or its successor). What could Apple do next year with 10 million $99 Apple TVs sitting, unassumingly, in the family rooms of 10 million households?
Really, though, this is all wishful thinking on my part.
Apple, please make your new Apple TV (or its successor) the Wii-killer it could be. If that concept just doesn’t seem to be Apple-worthy, at least make the Apple TV capable of piping the screen and audio output from an iPad directly into the home theater.
Sparser Documents in CouchDB with Ruby and CouchRest
I’ve become a huge fan of CouchDB and as a Rails developer that means turning to an ORM like CouchRest to make the database access more convenient. CouchRest has a ton of helpful features and really makes it easy to slide into developing for CouchDB.
Enough with that, though. CouchRest has a particular data serialization behavior that, for me, isn’t quite Couchy enough. Empty strings and null attributes still get stored in the database even though they contain “nothing.” To me, that’s not very useful and just leaves empty attributes in the database. These empty attributes can also interfere with the CouchDB views (indexes) if not handled correctly. In my view, one of the main benefits of a document-based schema-less database is not having to store null attributes and empty strings.
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Wave Couldn’t Compete with Email and Should Never Have Tried
After reading other post-mortem analyses of Google Wave’s demise, I think Google’s biggest failure still isn’t being addressed: Wave was competing with email, head on, and had no chance of winning.
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iPhone 3GS Owners Now Qualify for an Early Upgrade
Update: Neither system glitch nor random promotion, my iPhone 4 arrived without issue. I’m still eagerly awaiting the announcement of the end of AT&T’s iPhone exclusivity, though, despite my “month or so” prediction.
AT&T was very generous to offer iPhone 3G owners the iPhone 4 up to six months early. So why would they now offer iPhone 3GS owners, such as myself, the same opportunity? Some of us have 11 months left on our contract.
AT&T could have been mistaken as generous with their 3G offer, but this just feels like business desperation. My wager is on a big announcement in the next month or so that other large US iPhone carriers will be offering the iPhone 4 in every corner mobile store and mall kiosk.
If this comes to pass, it’s safe to say that Microsoft will be shut out of the mobile market for another year and Google’s impressive Android numbers will wither.
Adam Collins' Tumblelog
